On Ukraine’s musical frontline: how pop and classical music stars have taken up arms

Andriy Khlyvnyuk on stage with BoomBox in Paris last November, as part of their
European fundraising tour. Photograph: Stanislav Gurenko

by Ed Vulliamy

From nights at the opera to the nation’s best-loved bands, music is playing a vital role in resistance to the Russian invasion. And not only in terms of morale – many musicians have actually gone to the frontline.

Men arrive on crutches, two in wheelchairs, through a wintry dusk at the monumental neo-Renaissance opera house in Lviv, western Ukraine. Some 100 seats tonight have been reserved for serving soldiers, who enter the lobby – a fin-de-siècle wonder – in military fatigues. They hand these in, so that the coat check looks like a barracks locker room. A contingent of 40 cadets from the city’s emergency firefighting department duly arrives, disarmingly young. For most, it’s a first night at the opera.

The occasion marks the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – a concert dedicated to the troops who have fallen during this first, monstrous year of war, and the innocent civilian lives lost. But also to “The Invincible”: a homage in music to Ukraine’s noble cause and just war. The programme is Bucha. Lacrimosa by Victoria Polevá, composed in commemoration of the victims of atrocities in that town during the early weeks of the war, followed by Giuseppe Verdi’s epic Messa da Requiem. The stage is blackened, and on each flank red roses are arranged so that petals fall towards the ground.

Before the curtain, an announcement: “In the event of an air raid or siren, we ask you to adjourn to the shelter. If the air raid warning lasts less than an hour, the performance will resume.” Orchestra and choir take their places, followed by Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, creator of the international Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra.

Bucha. Lacrimosa opens with hushed percussion, joined by solo violin – desolate and sparse throughout. Verdi’s Requiem is shattering for the usual reasons, but focused by uncanny understatement entirely appropriate for this occasion.

The young fighters and firefighters are enthralled. During the day, through the doors of the nearby former Jesuit – now Greco-Catholic – church wherein military funerals are held, coffins were carried in by their comrades, for benediction, then back down the steps, accompanied by a dirge from a military band and followed by young widows and scores of other mourners in tears. The same had happened the day before, and would happen the day after. Now, Verdi’s unforgiving Dies Irae erupts, a swirl of acceleration and deceleration; mezzo-soprano Anastasiia Polishchuk’s delivery pierces the air, and with it her audience’s collective heart.

Daryna Lytovchenko in the premiere of Yevhen Stankovych’s 'The Terrible Revenge'
at Lviv National Opera. Photograph: Kras Yevheni

At the end, bouquets of roses presented to the female soloists and conductor are peace-white rather than blood-red, and Wilson picks hers apart, stem by stem, throwing each flower to the military sitting in rows A to F. There are photos of soldiers and firefighters on the foyer steps in front of a portrait of Solomiia Krushelnytska, the great Ukrainian soprano. Then out into the night.

Two evenings later, a different but no less impactful event: a new opera by Ukraine’s prominent Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych, The Terrible Revenge, based on the gothic horror story by Nikolai Gogol, born in Poltava – then part of the Russian empire, afterwards the USSR, now Ukraine. Significantly, the libretto, by Stankovych, is a resetting for the stage in Ukrainian of Gogol’s original Russian prose. Here is a dark masterpiece of cruel but cathartic prescience, composed – and the production designed by the Germans Andreas Weirich and Anna Schöttl to commemorate Stankovych’s 80th birthday – before the Russian invasion. The story concerns the antichrist, poisoning love and unleashing violence at an intimate level: he is also the father of the heroine, Katerina, whom he violates and murders. But it is also about the final defeat of this monster, hurled into an abyss by a young boy.

In several images during this war – including an anniversary postage stamp reproducing a mural by the British street artist Banksy – Ukraine has been portrayed as child David felling Russian Goliath. “Now,” writes composer Stankovych in a programme note, “all of this resonates with our reality, and what is happening.”

Ukraine used Banksy’s mural in Borodianka, portraying the war as a David and Goliath conflict, on an anniversary postage stamp. Photograph: Jose Hernandez/Rex/Shutterstock

“For the first time ever,” reflects the opera company’s literature and drama director Alina Plakhtiienko, “I ask myself: is this a time to play and hear music, with so many people dying? But I realise: there is no right or wrong time for music. Russia is trying to destroy our country and our culture, and so long as music is played in Ukraine, they will have failed in this. We still have culture, and therefore our nation.” We are talking in an elegant room at the theatre, once the private cabinet of Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I, with its own bathroom and door into the royal box.

Of these two unforgettable performances, Plakhtiienko says: “These were occasions on which to step back from our lives of daily tragedy, and think in music about those soldiers who died for our independence, and all victims of this Russian terror, especially the children. Verdi’s Requiem needs no explanation. And The Terrible Revenge conveys exactly what is happening now and what we want: revenge against our enemy.”

Nights at the opera in Ukraine – where everything, including every kind of music, has changed.

Andriy Khlyvnyuk and his group take a break. This is not the band with which he plays as Ukraine’s most famous rock star, but a unit of fighters from the frontline.

Khlyvnyuk is the songwriter and vocalist for BoomBox, Ukraine’s best-known band over the past two decades, recently launched to international stardom after a collaboration with Pink Floyd, with whom Khlyvnyuk recorded, in April 2022, a searing rendition of Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow. The words were written in 1875, the present tune was written during the first world war. It goes: “In the meadow a red viburnum bends down low / Our glorious Ukraine is troubled so / We’ll take that red viburnum and will raise it up / And our glorious Ukraine shall, hey, hey, rise up …” Khlyvnyuk recorded the vocal track in Kyiv, wearing camouflage and a New York Yankees cap, for Floyd superstars David Gilmour and Nick Mason to accompany from London, under the title Hey Hey Rise Up.

“This is my other band,” Khlyvnyuk beams this evening, waving an arm around the company at the bar, enjoying beers in Kyiv, grateful for the intermittent electricity. Almost immediately after the Russian invasion, Khlyvnyuk joined the volunteer unit of the patrol police, TOR, or tactical reaction operations. This is no normal police beat: Khlyvnyuk proudly shows a video of his patrol crew in combat fatigues on the frontline, deploying a Punisher drone against the enemy. The remote-controlled glider can discharge munitions at a distance of up to 30 miles. The video shows the Punisher unleashing a bomb on a Russian tank. “I call it a Ukrainian parking ticket,” Khlyvnyuk laughs. “Your vehicle is illegally parked in our country!”

The world has been stunned by the courage and efficacy of Ukraine’s resistance fighters. But few of these are professional soldiers: most are yesterday’s taxi drivers, plumbers, computer programmers – and musicians. People who until February 2022 were singing into microphones, spinning discs, playing clarinets or guitars, are now learned in the arts of war. Overnight, they have become perhaps the most formidable fighting force in the world. Andriy Khlyvnyuk is one of them.

Khlyvnyuk has a way of entwining stardom with humility; his manner mischievous and straightforward. In Kyiv he has to stop every few yards to pose for pictures; it takes us 20 minutes to get through a street market on a winter’s day when seven missiles hit the capital city.

“Eighty per cent of our sales were in post-Soviet Russia,” Khlyvnyuk tells me. “We won the biggest Russian music awards. These people bombing Kyiv today danced with their fiancées to my songs at their school graduations and weddings. These same men are now here trying to kill us, and I am trying to kill them.”

I ask Khlyvnyuk: was it hard to shift from being the country’s most famous rock star to a soldier under orders? “I thought it would be,” he says. “I was afraid of the brutality, noise and dirt of war. But it wasn’t – it was surprisingly easy.” Why? “Look, if I was sent somewhere to fight, I’d be useless, terrified; I don’t want to kill or be killed. But that’s not what happened. They came for our streets and our children’s playgrounds.”

Khlyvnyuk explains his motives for joining the TOR. “Music is a universal language. But music also comes from where you come from; it reflects the feeling of home, and what home means – and on the obligation to protect your family, your neighbour. Anyone who grew up learning their language, and their poets and music by heart knows to say to the empire, any empire: ‘You will not do this to us.’” He recalls the time his unit “went into Bucha when our army was pushing forward, and we saw our people – kids, wives, fathers – killed for their phones or cars, lying there, being eaten by their own starving dogs. So: what does it mean to be a human being when he or she finds themselves looking at this, or in trench warfare? This is not some natural disaster in Ukraine – this is being done to us. You have two options: run, or fight back.”

Musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk at the front in Ukraine. Photo: Stanislav Gurenko

BoomBox were formed in 2004, and their debut album, Melomania, made an immediate impact with its raw, flinty sound. They have played across Europe, Russia and America. Their spring 2022 tour was cancelled by the advent of war. Plane tickets to San Francisco were bought, at the ready.

Khlyvnyuk’s influences? “Jimi Hendrix plays 24/7 in my vehicle.” We talk about Hendrix’s cry about and against war, Machine Gun. Which prompts him to tell a story: “I really wanted a machine gun, and one day I was delivering cars to a special forces unit. The commander asked me: ‘What are you fighting with?’ and I replied: ‘All they give me is a pistol. I want a machine gun.’ The commander said: ‘As it happens, I killed a Russian yesterday, and took his gun. Have it.’ And he gave me the gun. I said I needed some ammo, the gun was useless without ot. And the commander said: ‘Honestly, you young people, you want everything! I do have a couple of clips though…’ and he gave me them too.” Proudly, Khlyvnyuk shows me a photo of his acquisition.

The most recent BoomBox album, Secret Code: Rubicon (2019), was laden with forewarnings – songs like Drantya, with its raw, metallic menace: “This is the last of your nine lives / Remember what you died of.” “The album was about what the world looked like in 2019,” says Khlyvnyuk, “but now in 2022, it’s taken on a whole new meaning. Now we know what can happen.”

“War doesn’t accept all music,” Khlyvnyuk tells me, “and not necessarily the music you’d expect. In war, people need to sing and laugh. It’s interesting to see why a certain song works in wartime, and another doesn’t. My hunch is that war needs love songs more than socially meaningful songs. I know guys going into battle loaded with weapons, tattoos up their necks, hardcore – but they’re not singing [Black Sabbath’s] War Pigs, they’re singing something pop, something easy, or perhaps a Beatles song just for the melody – a love song to make them smile!”

Playing during the war is different, too, he says. “It’s not a commercial act any more, it’s a fundraising tour to keep our police units on the frontline. We will play music so that our riflemen can fire bullets … Now, it has to be a communal thing, playing to people who have an extra reason to be Ukrainian together – a meeting of people with a common pain, people who’ve been to hell and back and have a story to tell.”

Taras Topolia keeps his military kit packed and ready by the front door of his apartment in Kyiv in case of an emergency call from his battalion. His wife and children are far away, in America – they, at least, are safe – so he has the place to himself when on leave from the front. The kitchen clock stopped at 6.35am on 25 February, the morning after the Russian invasion, “just as we were packing to leave”, says Topolia. “That’s the last time I kissed my wife and kids.”

Topolia – now under the command of the 130th battalion of the territorial army – is no ordinary soldier: he is Ukraine’s most celebrated pop singer of catchy hit melodies, the lead singer of Antytila (Antibodies). “We were preparing to release our album on 25 February. It never appeared,” he says. “Now that everything has changed, I’m unsure it ever will.”

“I never thought I’d be doing what I am doing,” says Topolia, “learning to kill, and trying to save my fellow soldiers from being killed. We’re musicians, and you have to sing, even during this period, to keep the voice strong. And of course I sing when someone asks me to at the front, to boost morale. But being a public figure is not the main thing for me now. In the trenches, I’m just another soldier.”

He looks back: “I wrote songs that make people happy – our music has a light inside it.” But, he says, in counterpoint to Khlyvnyuk, “it feels wrong to sing these love songs at such a time. If I were to write anything now, it would be about what is around me, and it would upset people.”

Taras Topolia performed for the public with U2’s Bono in a Kyiv underground
station last year. Photograph: Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images

Antytila was formed as a five-piece pop band in 2008, and rose quickly to fame with hits like Rosy Maidens and Kiss Me More. But during the Maidan democratic uprising of 2013, Antytila felt compelled to engage more seriously with Ukrainian society and politics. “We were part of the revolution for dignity, and played on the stage during the Maidan protests,” says Topolia. A video for the title track of their album from 2015, In Books, shows a little boy – an embodiment of Ukraine – running in flight from the city to fields of corn, where he is found and returned home by his father, who wears military fatigues. President Zelenskiy appeared in the video for another song called Lego. By the time of the 2022 invasion, Topolia and his fellow musicians had already joined the territorial defence.

After the invasion, Antytila wanted to join – by video link – a concert for Ukraine given by international stars in the UK, in Birmingham; the organisers rejected their offer because the band were fighting in the resistance. Their cause was taken up by the singer Ed Sheeran and superstars Bono and The Edge of U2: Sheeran recut his hit 2step to feature Antytila, and the Irish duo staged an acoustic concert in a Kiev subway station with Topolia during their visit to Ukraine in May 2022.

Topolia began learning classical violin aged six, studied as a chorister, then continued at the Kyiv conservatoire. His influences? “Chopin, Stravinsky and Berio. I was an academic musician, uninterested in modern music,” he says, until “the moment U2 became the biggest band in the world. That’s when I realised what was out there. So to sing with Bono was a dream I never expected to come true.”

Taras Topolia (centre) and his band, Antytila, at the front. Photograph: Nuno Veiga/EPA

How will the war change the band’s music? “To be honest, Antytila has not always made the music we wanted to create. It’s been targeted to an audience, and you lower your standards to do that. Now I will sing what I feel. What’s the point of a song if it doesn’t do that? When this is all over, if we survive, no more compromises with the commercial market. If people want songs that are not true, they won’t get them from us any more. We’ll present bad-tasting medicine in a sweet wrapper.”

And that is exactly what happened, though the wrapper was not as sweet as Topolia suggested. On the first anniversary of the invasion, Antytila headlined a major solidarity event and concert in London’s Trafalgar Square. They played a new song, the video for which is a searing cry of rage and tribute, filmed inside a warehouse in the embattled town of Bakhmut and cut with merciless footage of the battle. Topolia sings at full volume into a walkie-talkie: “Bakhmut fortress / All our prayers are here / And hearts of steel spirit … They give us strength from heaven / Will, fire and fury! … Mum, I’m standing / Motherland, I’m fighting.’

Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv is subject to unforgiving bombardment. During the late afternoons of winter the city plunges into a silent darkness even when there is electricity – this is done out of necessity, for the nocturnal cover. As night falls, the deep boom of explosions seems to ebb and flow – far away but audible, now horribly and loudly closer, then further away again.

The next day there’s a sudden burst of song across a shopping arcade on the city’s frayed outskirts, between Bambi, the children’s clothing store and the Violet Balloon boutique.

This is one in a series of pop-up recitals by soloists and musicians from the Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet, now rebranded Skhid Opera – skhid meaning east. It’s a lovely folk song, accompanied on violin by Vera Lytovchenko with blue and yellow ribbons on her instrument. The company performs similar concerts in hospitals, schools, metro stations and military installations. Shoppers rest their bags, children pause from chatter, teenagers park their phones, and everyone listens. “It’s more real than playing in the opera house,” says Lytovchenko, “almost too real. This is the most important time of our lives, and these are the most important performances we’ll ever play. Before, people came to us to listen – now we go to the people to play. It’s unlike anything we ever did before the war. It’s a way of saying: we’re not afraid.”

Violinist Vera Lytovchenko, who plays in shopping malls in heavily
bombed Kharkiv and practises in her cellar. Photograph: AP

This afternoon’s programme is almost entirely of Ukrainian traditional songs and arias from operas by Mykola Lysenko, the late-19th-century composer. Singing baritone is the opera company’s artistic director, Oleksiy Duginov, who tells me this period has brought about “a complete reassessment of values, a whole new understanding of what it means to be Ukrainian – and we hope that music will be part of that”.

Igor Tuluzov, chief executive of the opera house, watches and listens with a smile. “Since the beginning of the war, we’ve had trouble with the building itself – the roof was torn off by a missile,” he says. “We had an orchestral concert, but had to evacuate because of a bombing raid. So the performing changes completely – as does the repertoire,” he says. “I hope one day at least part of the Russian canon will return to Kharkiv, but for now we have resolved not to play any pieces by Russian composers.”

The opera house’s resolution reflects what is happening in the wider cultural landscape: across the country, statues of Alexander Pushkin as well as those of Catherine the Great are being felled; streets formerly dedicated to Leo Tolstoy or Mikhail Bulgakov have been renamed. Effectively: the purge of Russian culture from Ukraine – which poses a problem in the matter of language in Kharkiv, where Russian is the predominant tongue. “But it’s not a question of language,” says Tuluzov, “it’s about spirit and mindset, who and what we are. The division is between European democratic values and Russian imperial values.”

Nevertheless, the assertion of the Ukrainian language – and its precedence over Russian – is essential to the forging of what Ukrainians call “the political nation”. Born Russian speakers – especially young ones – are learning and turning to Ukrainian, eager to make it their first language. Here in Kharkiv, the most interesting local folk band, Morj (Ukrainian for walrus, inspired by the Beatles song), have abandoned all their Russian lyrics and now sing only in Ukrainian.

Kyiv, February: Ukrainian National Opera’s Natalka Poltavka by Mykola Lysenko,
is performed in national dress Photograph: Roman Pilipey/Getty Images

The week after the anniversary of the invasion, Kyiv’s national opera gave a new production of Natalka Poltavka by Lysenko. The story is about power and love in a peasant village but at the time of its premiere in 1889 it was also a snipe at the Russian empire – pointed towards imperial Romanov Moscow in the same comic-but-serious way that Smetana’s The Bartered Bride took aim at Habsburg Vienna. Natalka Poltavka was sanctioned by Russian officials, and Lysenko was later jailed in 1907 for supporting the 1905 uprisings against tsarist authority.

Crowds arrive for a matinee performance – the young woman in the seat behind me is here for the first time – “Despite the war?” I ask. “Because of the war,” she replies, “because we don’t know what will happen next.” My guest is Iaroslava Strikha, a literary critic and translator into Ukrainian of western European and American literature. She calls the opera “peasant kitsch – something important to Ukrainian identity.” Natalka Poltavka is opera buffa, “but also a slur against the old imperial order, and so a nourishment of our national identity. It’s funny, but it isn’t. If you see it through the eyes of the empire that oppresses us, it’s not kitsch, it’s serious, even dangerous.”

Meanwhile, at the opera house in Lviv Olha Lozynska, who directs the building’s glorious Mirror Hall for choral and chamber music, recalls a performance of Lysenko’s music on the night they reopened after the invasion. “It was the Orthodox feast of the Annunciation. We played settings by Lysenko of Taras Shevchenko [the famous poet of Ukraine’s 19th-century Romantic nationalist revival], and our audience was completely different from before the war. Before, when we played the mainstream repertoire, 70% of those present were tourists; for national music, the hall was more than half empty. But for this, we were sold out to an entirely Ukrainian audience. And I understood that night the extent to which music is part of this moment. No empty seats – not that night, and never since.”

Frankfurt, Germany, late November 2022. Khlyvnyuk and BoomBox emerge from a hotel on the outskirts of Germany’s financial capital, looking for dinner on the eve of their concert at a rock venue of note, Batschkapp. BoomBox’s tour of Germany, France and the Netherlands is their most ambitious since the war began.

BoomBox on tour consists of 12 people: six on stage, six “behind the scenes”, Khlyvnyuk tells me. One of these is a comrade from the police unit, Stanislav Gurenko, “rifleman, and also director of music videos”, shooting not with a gun at this point, but a camera. Stas – tattoos up his throat – is filming, here as on the frontline, “a documentary that tries to make sense of all this”.

The green room is modest, with trays of avocado, charcuterie and cheese, and a fridge of mineral water and beer. The band is quiet and focused. Khlyvnyuk introduces Inna Nevoit, who plays bass, “Someone saw her cleaning and catering in a metro bomb shelter and said: ‘Hey, Andriy – isn’t that your bass player?’ She was serving borscht, and I thought: ‘Inna, don’t ruin your hands, they’re golden.’”

Down the metal steps and out into another world, the waiting crowd is pressed against security barriers strewn with Ukrainian flags, and the air is thick with anticipation. Up come the lights, the noise elevates, and on come Khlyvnyuk and the band to a jubilant greeting. In reply, a now ubiquitous salutation among politicians and entertainers alike: “Good evening! We are from Ukraine!”

So are most people in the house, and in this heightened atmosphere BoomBox could get away with a decent performance, and still send their audience home happy. But they give it their all and more.

The audience speaks for itself. Anhelina Chumak and her 12-year-old daughter Yeva fled their home in Zarozhne in late February; her husband, Danyil, remains, fighting. “We’re now far away, in a strange place,” says Anhelina, “wondering whether we will ever be home again. But I saw BoomBox a few times, and when they play now, it’s like we’re all together again.” Volodymir Pavlenko arrived in Frankfurt from still-occupied Melitopol, via Lviv, this past March. “I had come to accept that I might never see my home again,” he says. “Tonight, I’m not so sure – when I hear this band, anything feels possible.”

Everyone is blown away by the climax of the evening: Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow. It begins as incantation, a cappella, the audience clapping and swaying in time: “And our glorious Ukraine shall, hey, hey, rise up …” The instruments join, building the song to rock-symphonic proportions, even without the backing of Pink Floyd. Girls mount their boyfriends’ shoulders and wave the flag aloft; children, teenagers and adults alike wear hard-won, bright, proud smiles.

There’s a short recuperative stop in the green room to greet friends and hardcore fans. Then back to the hotel, where we have a round in the atrium lobby. Tomorrow: Stuttgart. Khlyvnyuk is tired but elated. The plan now, he says, is to “fight through the winter, hoping to be in one piece by springtime, and if we survive that long, we’ll continue with America”.

He reflects on the evening, and the wider endeavour, “Tonight was the most charged so far,” he says. “At least 80% of that audience were recent refugees. They might have had tickets for the spring 2022 stadium show in Kyiv that never happened. And here we are in Frankfurt. But they pour out so much energy and love, it’s almost embarrassing, in a good way.

“I have to look into their eyes,” and here his own eyes moisten; he sips his beer, “but if I think about the importance of what’s going on, I wouldn’t be able to sing. Still, we have to do our job.” I suggest that they do it very well. “So we should; if we’re not good after 20 years, we never will be. But it’s never good enough, because we – the band – are not the important part of this now. They are.”

Published at The Guardian, July 23, 2023

• This is an edited version of an essay in Granta 164: Last Notes (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.